Talk:New Mexico

I took out the "Local travel guides" section of this region page. I'm not sure I understood what it was supposed to signify. All the cities and sub-regions listed in a region guide are also travel guides. Is there something I'm missing here? --(WT-en) Evan 17:24, 28 Sep 2004 (EDT)

Regions

I borrowed the regions from the New Mexico tourist map (http://www.newmexico.org/explore/index.php). There's probably some better terms for these regions, or more traditional regions, but these will have to do for now. --(WT-en) Evan 18:57, 11 Feb 2005 (EST)

These region categories are just fine, and match the way we New Mexicans think of the place, as well as realities of topography. The North Central and Southwestern regions are sufficiently diverse to justify some further breakout, and some of the others may be too. (Remember, most of these regions are about the size of South Carolina or Austria.) I'm working on the North Central, which I know well enough to make sensible subregions, but could use some help on the others. -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 18:02, 19 Oct 2005 (EDT)

Since there are no disambiguation pages for the various regions I'm going to dis-disambiguate them. -- (WT-en) Mark 02:38, 25 February 2006 (EST)

"Cities," so to speak

The only community in New Mexico that most of the world would recognize as remotely city-size (and even then with some condescension from dwellers in NYC, Mexico City, Jakarta, etc.) is Albuquerque. Several of the others listed (Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Taos, maybe Las Cruces and Roswell) are important enough in popular culture to merit a separate listing despite their town-like size, but I really wonder whether it's to the point to mention the rest unless there's either a separate article for them already, or a lack of anywhere else to mention them. I've taken the liberty of removing the (nonexistent) Las Vegas link in favor of mentioning the town as part of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, for which it is a portal, there being not a lot else about the place that's particularly notable. Opinions on this? Should the practice continue with some of the other towns and villages listed? Does anybody care? -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 18:33, 19 Oct 2005 (EDT)

I believe the standard policy is that the most important cities are listed in the top-most article, with less important cities moved to the sub-regions. Have a look at California, Bay Area (California) and East Bay (Bay Area) for a good example of how the granularity should increase as the region size decreases. -- (WT-en) Wrh2 18:45, 19 Oct 2005 (EDT)

That's consistent with what I'm proposing. (Got a chuckle, btw, out of the notion that Livermore is a "city" in the East Bay -- I travel there a lot, and it fits a different definition of "city" than the ones I know of! Yet it is larger than any of those second-tier places I mentioned except maybe Las Cruces, and VASTLY larger than several of the ones listed as "cities" in the article.) Perhaps moving, redirecting, etc., will make sense as some of the "region" pages for NM get filled out. -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 18:52, 19 Oct 2005 (EDT)

We've kind of opted for generality over accuracy for the "cities" listings in regions. I don't think we've come up with a good word that means "cities, towns, villages, hamlets, unincorporated communities, settlements, camps, etc." The closest we've got in the English language (and particularly in American English) is "city". It's unfortunate, but there's just not another word. We do use it pretty regularly even for the smallest towns (think of city hall, city services, city limits), but it unfortunately causes some confusion. For some areas, we've switched the "cities" header to "towns" or "villages" where it makes sense. I don't think over-accuracy in the headers is helpful; for example, changing "Cities" in New Mexico to "A city, several towns, and a few villages" is just clumsy.

We're supposed to have one-line descriptions of each "city" after the city link, so that might be a good place for more precise descriptions of the size of the settlement. --(WT-en) Evan 19:22, 19 Oct 2005 (EDT)

City is a great term, and nicely fits anything over a few hundred people. There are also really good words for larger cities, like "Big City", "Huge City", "Gigantic Megalopolis", and "Tokyo" in approximately that order. -- (WT-en) Mark 02:44, 25 February 2006 (EST)

OK, so how about principal cities?

I see that someone has added Rio Rancho, for which we have no article, to the "Cities" list, on the grounds that it's the "(s)econd largest city" in the state. I am not sure that a Rio Rancho is appropriate, however, on the grounds that it's an Albuquerque suburb and things there may be best treated in the Albuquerque article. Opinions? I can argue on either side of this one; John P, I'd be very interested in your view. -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 17:20, 7 May 2008 (EDT)

Someone added Taos to the cities list today, which brings the list to ten. However, Taos is a big draw for tourists, so rather than just remove it, would anyone be opposed for swapping out Las Vegas (New Mexico) or Los Alamos, which as far as I'm aware is a much less important town for travel purposes? Alternately, would swapping out another one of the cities for Taos make more sense? -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 12:40, 14 July 2011 (EDT)

No one has commented on this, so I'm going to go ahead and remove Los Alamos for now. If anyone disagrees about this, we can discuss here about what to swap out. (WT-en) texugo 07:31, 19 October 2011 (EDT)

Orienteer

On 12 December 2010 an anon editor cut-and-pasted a big chunk of text here from Orienteering in New Mexico, leaving that page as a redirect. I'm not sure so much detail belongs here. How about moving it back to where it was before? 67.100.204.219 21:09, 16 December 2010 (EST)

Could some of it not just move down into the regional/city articles. All we need to mention here is that orienteering is possible, and the places that it can be done. --(WT-en) inas 21:13, 16 December 2010 (EST)